Hikikomori, Solitary Youth of Japan

By definition, the hikikomori
(the term can also be used in the plural)
is one who withdraws from society. The Japanese word hiki means "to
pull" and
komoru
means "retiring" or "withdrawing," hence the sense of pulling out from
society.

The hikikomori
is considered a uniquely Japanese phenomenon. The hikikomori is
typically a male (80% are male), teenaged to 30 years old, who
has quit
school, has no technical skills, and is unemployed, living in his room
in his parents' house,
never coming out, taking meals left at his door by his parents, passing
the day reading, websurfing, viewing television, idling.

Hikikomori are not
strictly hermits (who have a strong psychological or intellectual
motive for solitude) and are more properly recluses. But the youth of the hikikomori, their
radical withdrawal, and their dependence on the tolerance of
parents --
especially the mother -- is considered unique to Japan. A related term
or
acronymn speciifically referring to the hikkikomori's social status
(but
including non-hikikomori as well) is NEET, meaining young people "Not
in Education, Employment, or Training."

Michael Zielenziger notes in his book Shutting Out the Sun
that

[Hikikomori]
cannot be
diagnosed as schizophrenics or mental defectives. They are not
depressives or psychotics; nor are they classic agoraphobics, who fear
public places but welcome friends in their own homes.

Richard Lloyd Parry adds that neither is it

the same as what in Japan is
called "school refusal", although inevitably sufferers from hikikomori
abandon their educations. Some are teenagers, but most are in
their twenties or older.

The Japanese Ministry of Health, Labor and Welfare, which long
ignored the problem, in 2003 defined hikikomori
as

avoiding social
participation, including avoiding school attendance, compulsory education, entering the
workforce -- including part-time jobs -- and associating with
somebody outside the
home; generally remaining at home for six months or more.

The Ministry also maintains that

Although as a general
rule we define hikikomori as nonpsychotic phenomenon ... it is not uncommon that hikikomori includes
schizophrenia before a definite diagnosis is made.

But according to the American Psychiatric Association's
standard Diagnostic and
Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM4), there is no
known psychiatric ailment from which hikikomori
suffer. Other observers have argued for symptoms of Asperger's and for what the
DSM4
calls "social avoidance disorder," but there is no clear evidence.
Zielenziger also suggests post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), which
further identifies the key element within Japanese opinion,
that hikikomori are suffering not a psychiatric but a social disorder.

Modern Japanese Society

To argue that social conditions are a chief source of a
psychological conditions in specifically
traumatized individuals is not favored by modern medicine or
science.
(A valiant exception is the physician Gabor Mate, M.D.). Yet this
thesis is familiar to sociologists. Examining recent Japanese
societal change provides a context for understanding the hikikikomori
experience as a result of a long historical process.

Japan was always
an insular nation until in 1853 United States gunboats under Admiral
William
Perry
"opened" the country to Western domination. Japan was forced
into economic dependence and regime change. With establishment of
the Meiji government in 1868, Japan set out to centralize the imperial
government and build a strong military in response to
Western humiliations it had suffered, a fate paralleling recent
European control of
China.

The humiliating defeat of Japan in World War II was compounded
by subsequent U.S.
occupation and thorough-going dismantling of Japanese
institutions. Japan's elites effectively scorned the vestiges of a
traditional agrarian economy and its social values to embrace
not only industrialization (already dominant since the Meiji) but specifically, capitalism and globalization.

Post-World War II children
were shunted into a high-stress school system, and the populace
into factories and bureaucracies. Japan suffered speed, noise,
urbanization, population shifts, and characteristic family
breakdown from
extended ie
or stem structure families to Western-styled nuclear family as the defaul social
unit. Suburban
sprawl and ubiquitous
technology became the norm in the crowding islands of Japan. The
culture feverishly
attempted
to redress humiliation while technocrats exploited the
Japanese character of cooperative stoicism.

In 1980's, the feverish economic bubble burst. But there could
be no return to the past.
Coincidentally, the hikkikomori phenomenon begins to emerge at this time, accelerating in the 1990's.

All
observers have noted the relentless pace of schooling in Japan, rigorous entrance exams beginning
before elementary school, high expectations of financial and career success placed on children
(especially males) beginning in elementary school, career tracking of youth as early
as
junior high school/middle school for university versus technical
training, 18-hour classroom and study days up to seven days a week,
plus bullying, peer pressure, conformity, and burn-out. Maggie Jones
notes: "As the Japanese saying goes, 'The nail that sticks out gets
hammered in.'"

As the disparity between parents and children widens, so does the
enormous
disparity between the myth of hard work for success and the dismal economic
and social reality of post-boom Japan.

If men, especially, were
driven by a "manic defense" in striving
for psychological redress after World War II, then post-boom
Japan
accelerated the relentless pace. For males especially, burning out by
high school means no academic or social future.

The dilemma of the hikkokomori is the initial experience of
alienation followed by the psychological but also practical inability
to reenter society. Zielenziger quotes one mother of a
hikikomori
as saying:

Hikikomori value the
intangibles ... but cannot speak out because there is no place in
Japanese society that allows them to. ... A person who challenges, or
makes a mistake, or thinks for himself, either leaves Japan or becomes
a hikikomori.

One articulate male hikikomori blogger writes that
he is aging, that he knows his parents will pass away some day, that he
should work as soon as possible. "I know," he admits. "But I'm not able
to overcome my Hikikomori."

Conclusion

Hikikomori
is in part a unique social and cultural circumstance of Japanese
society, but no observer has perceived hikikomori as the transformation of a long history of
eremitism characteristic of agraian, semi-feudal Japan -- and the
apparent disfiguration of eremitism in hikkikomori. Granted that the psychology of
modern society will not preserve this continuity. It is not difficult
to imagine the modern young hikkikomori as the hermits, wanderers, and monks of a
bygone era. As the mother quoted by Zielenziger noted,
hikkokomori simply do not fit in the modern age, but cannot go back to the
past either.

The
great irony in hikikomori lost to Western observers is the theme of solitude and isolation in Japanese
history, culture, and lore. The ancient Shinto creation myth describes the female deity Amaterasu lost in
isolation in the emblematic world of the dead after failing to create a
proper life for herself and her mate. She is forever destined to hide her disfigurement. This Japanese archetype
culminates in the story of the contemporary Japanese Princess Masako (born in 1963), who
lives in seclusion, said to suffer depression but, perhaps, suffering a
too-realistic view of her world.

And now, the fate of the
Japanese people so historically beset by disaster and tragedy, culminates in the
unspoken probability of Japan's destruction by nuclear radiation
and
the ironic disdain of the West after centuries of hostile attention
and exploitation, an entire nation ruefully represented in
the hikikomori.

¶

BIBLIOGRAPHICAL REFERENCES

Among sources on hikikomori
are:
Richard Lloyd Parry's article "This Man Won't Leave His Room. And He's
Not Alone" (http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/asia/
this-man-wont-leave-his-room-and-hes-not-alone-627576.html;
Phil Rees's article "Japan, the Missing Million"
(http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/programmes/correspondent/2334893.stm);
Maggie Jones' article "Shutting Themselves In"
(http://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/15/magazine/15japanese.html?pagewanted=all);
Michael
Zielenziger's book Shutting
Out the Sun: How Japan Created Its Own Lost
Generation
(New York: Doubleday, 2006) and his essay "Hikikomori and Other
Pathologies,"
presented to RIETI,
Japan's Research Institute of Economy, Trade & Industry, 2007.
(http://www.rieti.go.jp/en/events/bbl/07061501.html).
The blog
mentioned, "Hikikomori - Social withdrawal in Japan," is at
http://nhjournal37.blogspot.com.